Essays - a writer's view

I haven’t been writing fiction for a while. Sometimes people are quite reproachful about what they apparently perceive as deliberate abandonment of identity. Folk kindly enquire, “So what are you writing now?” I say, “I have no major project on the go.” Sometimes these kind people seem quite nonplussed, as if I’d signed up to write historical novels until the day of my death. “Oh, but you must,” they say, “but that’s such a shame!”. Or, more challengingly. “Why not?” I was asked this after a reading, and when I tried to think why not, I said perhaps it was because I’d acquired seven grandchildren in the past eight years. “That’s not a real reason,” snapped my questioner.

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat seems marginally easier than producing a real reason for anything. I liked writing historical novels. They were long, deeply absorbing projects, each one lasting three or four years. I could completely immerse myself in the world of the novel. It was always a good, if challenging, place to be. Now history itself seems to have caught up with me. If one has the option of living in uninteresting times (it’s always an option: interesting and dreadful things never cease to happen, but where I have been, there was always the choice of ignoring them) then that is indeed great good fortune. One is free to live in peace and unprecedented comfort, and think about whatever one likes. One can say and write whatever one likes, too.

I don’t think I’m living in that world any more. Political engagement isn’t new to me. I’m a child of the 1960s: I came of age campaigning for peace, civil rights, feminism, the environment. My earliest novels reflect that zeitgeist far more than I was aware of at the time. Then all that hands-on activism seemed to recede, and writing novels came to the fore. But what now?

The uncomfortable truth is that all my life long we have been hurtling ever faster towards making our planet uninhabitable, for us and for almost all other species. Whatever we’ve said, whatever we’ve written, we have not changed that fact one jot. And if nothing changes, the writing is not in our hands any more, but on the wall. In a world of human conflict and social injustice, it’s the weakest and poorest who suffer first and most. I don’t think the human race is capable of taking the necessary steps to soften the inevitable finale. But an ending will come, not dictated by our laws, but by the harsh laws of nature.

So what’s that got to do with ceasing to write historical novels? Not much, except inside my head. When I was young, and marched with brightly-coloured banners, I thought we could change the world. I now think I can change almost nothing, and what I can change is mostly achieved one to one and face to face. Nothing I write will change the course we’re collectively on, not by a millionth of a degree. That’s no justification for despair. It’s still the case that thinking, and exchanging ideas, and enjoying life, is a Good Thing.

I find that sometimes I have an idea or a project, and I just want to say something about it. When I realised I didn’t have a plan for another novel, and people used to ask, “So what are you writing now?” I used to look a bit shifty, and mumble, “Nothing much just at the moment.” Now, I reply with bright conviction, “Essays.”

I liked writing essays at school. I kept quiet about how much pleasure it gave me, because the done thing was to moan and groan at these assignments. I took a guilty pleasure in spending hours in the school library, but I tried to pretend I wasn’t really there very much. Maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to notice what I am now doing is writing essays. Not world-changing ones, just about this and that, as it comes my way.

Academic Writing

I worked in a university for sixteen years, and it was obligatory to write academic articles, preferably for prestigious journals. Latterly one had to publish four items a year, whether one had anything worth saying or not. That would have been a problem in the early years for Lord Kelvin, or Albert Einstein - no tenure for them. Since I was not changing the paradigms of the universe in the very slightest, I managed to produce a bit of this and that.

The advantage of inadvertently dropping into academia at a late stage, is that I had to grapple with literary theory. This was hardly a blip on the radar when I was at Durham University in the late 1960s. Back then we did practical criticism, which was basically reading books, talking about books, reading more books that talked about books, and referring to books that talked about books, when we ourselves wrote essays about books. I loved it. Finding myself on the staff of an English literature department in 1990, I had to rapidly catch up on post modernism and literary theory.

I was also expected to write articles informed by literary theory. The first articles I wrote were very much in the vein of the practical criticism I’d learned at university, and my thinking and reading in the ensuing twenty years. When I first began to engage with the theory, I wrote one or two essays that groaned under the weight of it. They mount an argument self-consciously based on some aspect of theory, and proceed to give an exemplary reading using that theory. Heavy stuff. Once I’d properly assimilated these new ideas, I stopped thinking about it so laboriously. Instead, it entered and refined my thinking. It was a good discipline after all, but it’s about learning to think with more acumen, not about trying on theories in a shop and somehow making them fit. My later critical essays are much simpler and more to the point - or so I think. My readings are my response to the text. It’s all up for debate - your readings may be quite different. But the readings can be honed by careful analysis, which is an intellectual skill, and fun to do. It won’t stop the polar ice caps melting, but if people learn to think better, in any way at all, that can only be good.

I thought that being back in a university would mean being able to talk to people about ideas and books as much as one liked. Just occasionally, that was even true. Although I sometimes found departmental life quite toxic, an experience which has marked me to this day, I had some great students. I supervised some interesting PhDs, (even though I never got a PhD myself. I was too busy writing novels. It’s done differently now.) I can mark the success of some of these students in the wide world by the fact that ex-students sometimes take me out to lunch. Thus the tables (to continue the lunch metaphor) get turned.

In the 1990s I went to regular conferences on the Literature of Region and Nation, and the Literature of Small Islands, on Northern Studies and on Women’s Writing. These were small conferences, and usually took place in interesting places, often overseas. The participants were expert and enthusiastic. Unfortunately one gets fewer points for giving conference papers than being published in the “right” journals, and these small maverick conferences ceased to actually count for any points at all. Also there was no money. but it was great while it lasted. Through conferences, residencies and secondments, there were aspects of the academic world that shaped my writing in a very painless manner.

My contact with the academic world is now sporadic, and interesting when it happens. Oddly enough, some of my most recent academic assignments have been among archaeologists rather than literary critics. Although an enthusiastic volunteer on various digs, I have no archaeological credentials whatsoever, but I drew upon archaeological sources both for my Norse novels, Islanders and The Sea Road, and, most of all, for my mesolithic novel, The Gathering Night. The last particularly has given me a small-scale new lease of life in academia. It was scary defending my conclusions about the Scottish Mesolithic to a bunch of German archaeologists in Hannover, and even scarier waiting for reviews of my fiction in Scottish archaeological journals, but it’s interesting operating in a discipline not one’s own. In the course of writing fiction, I have often tagged along to historical and archaeological events. This has confirmed my awareness that I like being an outsider best. One can be quite maverick, and not compete, and sit near the door. Exit strategy has always been my thing.A selection of Essays & Articles appears below

The illustrations at the top of this page and below are also the author's views.

Short stories and poems: a tale of long ago

In the 1980s there was a good choice of magazines and journals to which one could send short stories and poems. I began, as most writers did, by writing short stories and poems and posting them off, and then waiting for the A4 envelopes to come back again… or not. At that time one expected to get an answer, either way, though the wait could be quite long. My first story was published in Chapman (Edinburgh). Other stories and poems appeared in Northlight, Writing Women, New Writing Scotland, Scottish Short Stories, Edinburgh Review and so on. I think it was all easier back then.

Short stories of mine appeared in a couple of anthologies published by The Women’s Press, after which they asked me if I’d written anything more, and that’s how they came to take my first novel. In 1990 The Women’s Press also published my collection of stories, An Apple From a Tree. When this was reprinted by Kennedy and Boyd (it’s still avalable from them), they added some other early stories to the collection. When I read these stories now, they seem far away and long ago. The earliest ones are heavily influenced by second wave feminism. The settings still speak to me; the stories are set in the places that have shaped my life, and the places endure in my mind more than the zeitgeist. I think now I prefer my poems, though I have ceased to write any poetry at all. The poems are about moments, and those moments come alive again if I read them now.

Once I was well into writing novels, I stopped writing stories and poems. The longer projects took up all my attention; I could immerse myself in the world of the novel, and, apart from having to live my life, which was often quite distracting, I just dwelled in my fictional world. I wrote one more long story, or novella, Gato, in about 1996. It’s set in a Medieval mill, and it’s about a child who has to make its own way in the world. It didn’t get published for a while - too long for an anthology, too short for a book - and then I was asked to write a novella for a project run by the Sandstone Press, to produce writing for emergent readers, that is to say, adult readers, with adult tastes, who need the reading process to be accessible to them.

Gato

Gato, with adaptations, proved ideal for this format, and came out in 2005. Besides adults with reading difficulties, the books in the series were used as English language readers for asylum seekers in Scotland. I was delighted to get feedback that asylum seekers from rural areas related to the story, as it was like the places they came from. There is a twist to Gato, regarding the gender of the narrator. Ordinary readers usually got it quite quickly, but the compilers of some educational questions, which went with the book, completely missed the point. Interesting.

Gardening Books

I wrote two books on organic gardening, published in 1987 and 1990, which makes them pretty much ancient history now. In the 1980s I worked for four years in the Findhorn garden, which is where I learned most of my gardening. Before that, my parents were keen gardeners, but I mostly observed them from the treetops, as at that stage I was far more into climbing than delving. I now like to do a bit of both, but I don’t write about it any more.

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Speaking to the Animals about the Hunt

Margaret Elphinstone's TED talk is now available on line.In her talk, Margaret looks at how our technological inventiveness has outstripped our social and psychological development. We cannot handle the world we have created. Her talk seeks lessons from our distant ancestors who knew they must listen to the Earth and the Animals. We must rediscover and apply their skills if we are to survive. She argues that the arts have a crucial role in creating contemporary narratives addressing our predicament and offering alternative visions.

Gleanings from the Glenkens

Find out more about this new publication by Margaret Elphinstone's Galloway writing group.